The 50 Best Gentleman Movies Of All-Time
1. DIRTY HARRY 1972
As avenging cop Dirty Harry Callahan, Clint Eastwood shoots first and asks questions later, creating the most politically incorrect hero in movie history. With his ever ready .44 magnum (“the most powerful handgun in the world”), Clint brings unreconstructed frontier justice to criminal-coddling San Francisco, becoming a role model for law-and-order conservatives everywhere. Ronald Reagan even took his best line (“Make my day”) from Sudden Impact, a later Dirty Harry film.
Key Scene: Clint’s final face-off with Scorpio, the deranged psycho killer.
Best Line: “You have to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”
2. 
THE GODFATHER 1972
“What is it with men and The Godfather?” wonders chick-flick princess Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail. Tom Hanks responds for us all: “It is the I Ching. It is the sum of all wisdom.” Francis Ford Coppola’s mob opera is the modern guy’s indispensable guide to surviving with honor in a dog-eat-dog world.
Key Scene: How can anyone choose? The horse head in the bed? Sonny’s murder? Michael shooting the cop in the restaurant? We know every one backward and forward.
Best Line: “Don’t ever take sides with anybody against the family again.” “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” “Leave the gun; take the cannolis.” There are millions of them.
3. SCARFACE 1983
An unapologetic assault on everything decent and honorable — and that’s why we love it. Al Pacino’s Tony Montana makes his Michael Corleone look and sound like Mr. Rogers. Nothing beats the film’s coke-fueled mobster wisdom. Lines like: “First you gotta make the money… then you get the power, then you get the woman” set the tone for a whole generation of gangsta rappers.
Key Scene: One word: chainsaw.
Best Line: “Say hello to my leetle friend.”
4. DIE HARD 1988
Forget all the great action scenes this film has — the best moments are when underdog Bruce Willis kicks the snobby Eurotrash villains’ asses without ever losing his all-American sense of humor. The scene where the German villain gets his comeuppance for trying to use the word “cowboy” as an insult resonates more today, though it’d be even better if the guy were French.
Key Scene: Bruce crashes through the window hanging from the firehose.
Best Line: “Yippee-kai-yay, motherf–ker!”
5. THE TERMINATOR 1984
Arnold Schwarzenegger was originally offered the human lead, but he realized that a killer robot from the future was the role he was really born to play. “There is a little bit of the Terminator in everybody,” director James Cameron observed. “He operates completely outside all the built-in social constraints.”
Key Scene: Any qualms about rooting for a malevolent robot vanish when he vaporizes a tacky L.A. dance club.
Best Line: “I’ll be back.”
6. THE ROAD WARRIOR 1981
Along the endless highways of the Australian outback the loner hero of western and samurai fame gets a futuristic face-lift from Mel Gibson’s leather-clad Mad Max. The film has it all: punk-rock marauders, a razor-edged boomerang, postnuclear angst, and high-speed demolition-derby car battles, plus just the right amount of mythic uplift to put it over the top.
Key Scene: When Wez, the deranged Mohawk man, erupts over the hood of Max’s truck, it’s a “boo” shot for the ages.
Best Line: “You want to get out of here, you talk to me.”
7. THE DIRTY DOZEN 1967
Forget Catch 22: World War II gets its true sixties makeover when Lee Marvin trains a bunch of prison rats and turns them into a squad of stone-cold killers tough enough to make Americans, whether redneck or hippie, proud as hell. The cast is a macho who’s who: Jim Brown, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine… Telly Savalas! A true believer is anyone who’s seen it a dozen times.
Key Scene: Jim Brown’s heroic death sprint, a feat of open-field running — while tossing hand grenades — that beats anything he ever did with the Cleveland Browns.
Best Line: “You’ve got one religious maniac, one malignant dwarf, two near-idiots, and the rest I don’t even wanna think about!”
8. THE MATRIX 1999
This cyberpunk epic signaled a new kind of male hero, the tough-guy computer geek, and Keanu Reeves makes a most excellent digital superdude. By setting the nonstop action in cyberspace the Wachowski brothers are able to supercharge all the fights with gravity-defying wire fu and some amazing breakthrough CGI.
Key Scene: Neo’s airborne subway station showdown with the heinous Agent Smith.
Best Line: “There is no spoon.”
9. CADDYSHACK 1980
Rodney Dangerfield, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and an animatronic gopher named Chuck E. Rodent make mincemeat of your old man’s snooty pastime. It took 20 years and the arrival of Tiger Woods to make the game seem cool again.
Key Scene: Rodney in excelsis at a high-tone country club soiree bellowing “No offense!” to the horrified diners.
Best Line: “Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!”
10. ROCKY 1976
A blue-collar anthem for the ages, as lunkhead from the neighborhood makes good because he can absorb a surreal amount of punishment. The sequels fudged the fable with too many sappy clichés, but the original lays it on the line. Working guys embraced Sylvester Stallone as a punch-drunk Great White Hope, often bloodied but still unbowed.
Key Scene: Sly on the steps of Philly’s Museum of Art, doing his bouncy victory dance.
Best Line: “All I wanna do is go the distance.”
11. FULL METAL JACKET 1987
The late, great Stanley Kubrick originally thought he was making the ultimate war-is-hell movie, but in the end the film turns out to be a pitch-black comedy. Not everyone admires the result (critic David Thomson calls it “an abomination”), but it has become a true cult classic, and the fiercely scatological dialogue can be heard in bars and college dorms everywhere being repeated reverently by fans. Credit must go to R. Lee Ermey, a former real-life staff sergeant, whose obscene tirades set a new standard for trash talk.
Key Scene: The sniper’s identity revealed: a true peek into the abyss.
Best Line: “You had best unf–k yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck!”
12. DR. NO 1962
The first and purest of the James Bond flicks, before the series turned cute and predictable. Sean Connery’s 007 still has that scary edge of lethal ruthlessness. It’s an edge he will never have again as the later films (and later Bonds) devolve into a family entertainment franchise. (And trust us, Vin Diesel is not the answer.)
Key Scene: What teenage boy ever forgets his first glimpse of Ursula Andress emerging from the breakers? Eat your heart out, Halle Berry.
Best Line: “That’s a Smith and Wesson. You’ve had your six.”
13. THE KILLER 1989
John Woo’s signature film is a bullet ballet of male bonding. Chow Yun-Fat is a hit man whose code of honor poleaxes tough cop Danny Lee. Critics unfamiliar with the Chinese tradition of “sworn brotherhood” say the movie has a gay subtext. Crazy, right?
Key Scene: Lee cauterizes the killer’s wound with gunpowder.
Best Line: “The only person who really knows me turns out to be a cop.”
14. RAGING BULL 1980
Robert De Niro bulks up and lashes out as lowlife fifties antichamp Jake LaMotta, a jealous brute whose life’s work was beating people to a pulp. Miraculously, Martin Scorsese makes it into an ode to the human spirit. Joe Pesci, as Jake’s brother, makes punk poetry of Paul Schrader’s f–k-encrusted dialogue.
Key Scene: The slo-mo fights, choreographed to the sound of exploding flashbulbs.
Best Line: “Did you f–k my wife?”
15. BULLITT 1968
The ultimate Steve McQueen, and a defining moment in guy movie history. He was the coolest star we ever had, and his minimalist charisma keeps winning converts with every passing year. A cop story set in San Francisco, Bullitt isn’t driven by the script or the action — it’s just McQueen being McQueen. Taken as a whole, his career teaches us one fundamental truth: Real men should talk less and drive more.
Key Scene: The car chase, for sure, a witty trendsetter over SF’s roller-coasting hills, with Steve the racing buff clearly visible behind the wheel of his 390 Mustang GT.
Best Line: “You work your side of the street and I’ll work mine.”
16. ENTER THE DRAGON 1973
There were kung fu killers with smoother moves, but no one had Bruce Lee’s enraged magnetism. Before he sealed his legend by dying young, the savagely graceful actor explained his secret: “I am not acting. I am just doing my thing.”
Key Scene: Battling the steel-clawed Han in an underground hall of mirrors.
Best Line: “Through long years of rigorous training, sacrifice, denial, pain, we forge our bodies in the fire of our will.”
17. APOCALYPSE NOW 1979
How many people truly admire this Francis Ford Coppola-John Milius collaboration as a scathing indictment of the debacle in Vietnam? Damn few. The real reason the film keeps growing in stature is that it’s a hallucinatory head trip, the war film to watch when you are baked and basted.
Key Scene: Helicopters attack to the tune of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”
Best Line: “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.”
18. GOODFELLAS 1990
Half tragedy, half farce, Martin Scorsese’s sadistic gangster classic is a heartfelt fantasy about joining the ultimate boys club. The best scenes are the social gatherings at nightclubs and backroom card games at which the made men savor their precarious status.
Key Scene: The zippy montage sequence depicting the coke-addled frenzy in which Henry Hill’s house of cards finally collapses.
Best Line: “You think I’m funny?”
19. RESERVOIR DOGS 1992
Quentin Tarantino’s ferociously black comedy about a botched bank job that goes horribly, violently bad has outlasted the nitpickers who dismissed it as a derivative video geek’s greatest-hits anthology with attitude. The borrowed building blocks are much less important than the inspired embellishments. The peerless ensemble cast (led by Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, and Steve Buscemi) make a full-course meal of some of the crudest (and funniest) tough-guy backchat ever written. Early on, the distributor suggested removing the horrific ear-cutting scene, but Tarantino balked. “If violence is part of your palette,” he said later, “you have to be free to go where your heart takes you.”
Key Scene: We’re all ears.
Best Line: “Mr. Brown? That sounds too much like Mr. Shit.”
20. FIGHT CLUB 1999
The crude message — we prove our manhood by learning how to take a punch — works best when Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are recklessly acting it out rather than simply jawing about it. They almost make you believe it.
Key Scene: The sucking-on-the-gun shot, a truly shocking sight.
Best Line: “First rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club.”
21. THE USUAL SUSPECTS 1995
Even more than Tarantino’s stuff, Chris McQuarrie’s Oscar-winning script for this Rubik’s cube of a caper movie is about guys who live to riff on flavorful tough-guy clichés. Repeated viewings, even once you know who Keyser Soze is, can’t dim the film’s layered luster.
Key Scene: The lineup. It’s all there if you know what to look for.
Best Line: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
22. BLAZING SADDLES 1974
Every Mel Brooks movie works better on home video than it does in theaters because (like all the Airplane movies) they’re really just anthologies of hilarious but dumb gags loosely strung together. Saddles, then, is a classic guy movie by default, because you can drink and talk and even doze off while watching it and you’ll still have a great time.
Key Scene: Beans, beans, the musical fruit.
Best Line: “Excuse me while I whip this out.”
23. THE WILD BUNCH 1969
Outlaws run bloodily amok in war-torn Mexico in 1914, the west’s final frontier. “I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times,” said director Sam Peckinpah. “The strange thing is that you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line.” The ultraviolent finale is a balletic mass suicide as William Holden and his bunch snatch glorious defeat from the jaws of meaningless victory.
Key Scene: The final, orgiastic bloodbath.
Best Line: “If they move, kill ’em.”
24. THE MALTESE FALCON 1941
Few other movies of this vintage have aged as well. With the edge of sadistic menace that Humphrey Bogart brings to the role of private eye Sam Spade, and the staccato crispness of director John Huston’s pacing, the movie still feels bracingly modern. Its cynicism stings no matter how many times you watch it.
Key Scene: Spade’s true viciousness emerges in his bullying of the sniveling Wilmer (Elisha Cook Jr.).
Best Line: “When you’re slapped you’ll take it and like it.”
25. UNFORGIVEN 1992
There have been plenty of “revisionist” westerns over the years, but Unforgiven is the last one we’ll ever need. Clint Eastwood pulls the rug out from under every romantic myth of the Old West. His perpetually disgusted hero is a retired gunfighter who has come to realize that killing is an ugly, irreversible act.
Key Scene: The messy, bloody gunfight with corrupt lawman Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman).
Best Line: “Hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”
26. THE SEVEN SAMURAI 1954
The most influential action film of all time was made in Japan by Akira Kurosawa almost 50 years ago — yet the western remake, The Magnificent Seven, is still more familiar here than the indelible original. A band of outcast warriors (including Toshiro Mifune) defends a peasant village against a gang of bandits.
Key Scene: The battle in the rain, the most electrifying action sequence ever filmed.
Best Line: “The farmers have won, not us.”
27. DINER 1982
Screenwriter Barry Levinson made his directorial debut with this autobiographical comedy set in Baltimore in 1959, and it’s one of the smartest films ever made about guys growing up together. It’s a male bonding film that doesn’t simply glorify arrested adolescence, it recognizes the necessity of wising up and moving on. The film’s great cast of future notables includes Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser, and Mickey Rourke — as a hipster in his own mind, the role he’s been playing ever since in real life.
Key Scene: The football quiz.
Best Line: “You gonna finish that?”
28. THE BIG LEBOWSKI 1998
This cult comedy — about getting in touch with your inner slacker — is revered as a quasi-religious text by fans. Jeff Bridges is sublime as the Dude, a laid-back stoner who crisscrosses L.A. in search of bowling partners, nihilists, a kidnapped nympho, and a new rug. Not the Coen brothers’ best film, but their best guy film.
Key Scene: Nihilists attack the Dude by throwing a live marmot into his bathtub.
Best Line: “That rug really tied the room together.”
29. SHAFT 1971
As in so many private-eye stories the plot (what there is of it) is much less important than the grotty urban settings and the detective’s pugnacious swagger. Richard Roundtree’s John Shaft is an iconic presence in black leather, more than cool enough to deserve Isaac Hayes’s Oscar-winning theme song, which kerchunks along relentlessly on the soundtrack.
Key Scene: Every sequence featuring Moses Gunn as Bumpy Jonas, the gravel-voiced Harlem gang lord.
Best Line: “Don’t let your mouth get your ass in trouble.”
30. 48 HRS 1982
Walter Hill’s two-fisted action comedy set the pattern for all the facetious odd-couple buddy pictures of the past two decades. But we never held that against it. Nick Nolte’s growly, grizzled, burned-out cop next to Eddie Murphy’s preening slickster in his mothballed suit (he’s a con on a two-day “work release” to help catch his former partner) are vivid characters who strike flinty sparks off each other. We’re still keeping our fingers crossed for a director’s cut DVD that restores Annette O’Toole’s snipped shower scene.
Key Scene: Murphy takes over a redneck bar (and the movie) armed with only an empty gun and some major attitude.
Best Line: “I’m your worst f–kin’ nightmare, man: a nigger with a badge.”
31. THE SEARCHERS 1956
John Ford’s masterpiece draws a bead on a key theme of the western: the gunfighter as necessary evil. John Wayne shows his true greatness here, a greatness that critics are just learning to appreciate. Fans like Martin Scorsese and George Lucas (who echoes Ford in Star Wars) were drawn to Wayne’s character as much for his bitter dark side as for his laconic manliness — traits, the film suggests, that may be inextricably linked.
Key Scene: Wayne shoots the eyes out of a corpse; this Indian will go sightless to the happy hunting ground.
Best Line: “That’ll be the day.”
32. PLATOON 1986
The Vietnam era’s All Quiet on the Western Front captures the bone-deep hopelessness of being on the front lines of a lost cause. Oliver Stone’s Oscar winner is sometimes overblown and self-important, but the emotional center is where it’s always been in great war pictures: in the life-and-death bonds forged between individuals under fire.
Key Scene: Torching a village to the Adagio for Strings.
Best Line: “We’ve been kicking other peoples’ asses for so long I figure it’s time we got ours kicked.”
33. ANIMAL HOUSE 1978
This smash-hit, pig-out, anarchy-loving comedy didn’t so much reverse the post-sixties antifraternity trend as take it to the next level, focusing on a guerrilla enclave of losers and geeks who trash the system from within. It’s either the first flatulent trumpet blast of the spring break generation or a profound look back at the essence of sixties politics. Either way, it’s still the funniest college flick ever.
Key Scene: John Belushi kisses off phony folk singers once and for all by smashing one’s guitar.
Best Line: “I’m a zit!”
34. THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY 1966
Sergio Leone cooks up the ultimate spaghetti western, so tickled by its own sun-baked amorality that we have to laugh. Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and a cackling Eli Wallach inventively double-cross each other for a chest of Confederate gold. Rent or buy only the restored director’s cut DVD, which reinstates the film’s narrative sweep.
Key Scene: The three men’s final showdown in the cemetery: the definitive Mexican standoff.
Best Line: “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”
35. THE LONGEST YARD 1974
The best football-in-prison movie ever. Bone-crushing game sequences play as slapstick, and Burt Reynolds is perfect as the disgraced former pro quarterback, jailed for a point-shaving scandal and redeemed by leading a squad of convicts against a team of brutal guards.
Key Scene: Burt’s “Gipper” speech.
Best Line: “You could’ve robbed banks, sold dope, stole your grandmother’s pension check, and none of us would have minded. But shaving points off a football game? Man, that’s un-American.”
36. BLADE 1998
In a steel-cage death match between Blade and Wolverine, the smart money would be on Wesley the Vampire Slayer, the half-undead guy with the silver sword. This gothic gorefest is still the best attempt yet to duplicate the flamboyant dynamism of hard-action comic book mayhem on the big screen. Mr. Snipes always strikes the perfect heroic pose.
Key Scene: The grisly vampire nightclub episode.
Best Line: “Crosses and water don’t do dick, so forget what you saw in the movies.”
37. STRIPES 1981
What a relief! Shrugging off the antimilitary guilt of the post-Vietnam era, goof-off turned enlisted man Bill Murray tells sarcastic slackers it’s cool to kick ass and wave the flag again. Along with Meatballs this may be Murray’s most irresistible comedy. Plus, it’s got John Candy mud-wrestling.
Key Scene: Costar Harold Ramis teaching his ESL class to sing “Da Doo Run Run.”
Best Line: “Any of you guys call me Francis, and I’ll kill ya.”
38. NORTH DALLAS FORTY 1979
One of the toughest, funniest movies ever made about the big business of pro sports, with a surprisingly moving subplot about friendship and betrayal. Nick Nolte is a broken-down hulk of a wide receiver, bent and twisted by injuries, who continues in spite of the blinding pain.
Key Scene: Two players are goaded into a racially charged fistfight to get their blood up for a big game.
Best Line: “I love your legs. They got your feet at one end and your pussy at the other.”
39. THE UNTOUCHABLES 1987
Hollywood’s version of the guy trifecta — Sean Connery, Robert De Niro, and Kevin Costner — join forces in Prohibition-era Chicago to retell the story of lawman Elliot Ness and mobster Al Capone. Another tough guy, Chicagoan David Mamet, wrote the script, and his dialogue crackles and pops like a tommy gun.
Key Scene: The train station shootout, with a baby carriage right out of Battleship Potemkin.
Best Line: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way. And that’s how you get Capone.”
40. THE GREAT ESCAPE 1963
This true tale of Allied POWs outfoxing their German captors offers the irreplaceable pleasure of watching some top actors (James Garner, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and above all Steve McQueen) exhibit unflappable coolness under pressure. The no-sweat heroism practiced here by gallant Brits and laconic Yanks is a refreshing alternative to the head-banging bluster of contemporary action films.
Key Scene: McQueen in solitary, bouncing that baseball.
Best Line: “It is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape.”
41. THE THREE STOOGES
Stooge-o-philia came out of the closet when Mel Gibson adopted their trademark gestures in Lethal Weapon. Spider-Man director Sam Raimi is another key aficionado. These men know something that many nonfans (and all women) do not: The dumber and more violent it gets, the funnier it is. Stooge fans can now rejoice that practically the entire oeuvre is out on DVD.
Key Scene: The Stooges fast asleep, collaborating on a syncopated snore.
Best Line: “I’d knock your brains out if you had any!”
42. THE HUSTLER 1961
Hot-wired young pool shark Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) cares so much about playing the game with dash and flair that he sets himself up for defeat at the hands of a cool, calculating bottom-liner: Jackie Gleason as the mythical monster Minnesota Fats, a sort of pool-hall killer whale. Fast Eddie would be dismissed as a sap and a loser in any modern big-studio story meeting, but it’s still a lovely dream: a celebration of the kind of high-minded code of values that hardly anybody lives by anymore.
Key Scene: Eddie pouring out his heart to girlfriend Piper Laurie; it’s Paul Newman’s “I coulda been a contender” speech, as intense as Brando’s but less mannered.
Best Line: “Even if you beat me, I’m still the best.”
43. SLAP SHOT 1977
The perfect movie for those of us who watch hockey only for the fights. The misfits in a bush league team finally start winning only when they knuckle down and start playing dirty. The cynicism never seems to rub off on Paul Newman, who, as the team’s coach, manages to remain sympathetic even when he’s instituting a bonus system that rewards acts of violence on a sliding scale.
Key Scene: Michael Ontkean’s on-ice strip tease.
Best Line: “I may be bald, but at least I’m not chickenshit.”
44. THE FRENCH CONNECTION 1971
Famous for its great car-against-train chase sequence, this fact-based police procedural used the hero’s viciousness to jack up the suspense. You’re never sure when narcotics detective Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is going to pistol whip a suspect or drop a casual racial slur.
Key Scene: The chase was essentially improvised, executed pedal-to-the-metal without permits.
Best Line: “All right, Popeye’s here!”
45. OFFICE SPACE 1999
Seething with frustration at his life in fluorescent-lit cubicles, a sarcastic smart guy has himself hypnotized into a state of blissed-out recklessness. The only live-action feature by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-head, this is the sort of movie that in its dialog and even in its tone and editing sums up the attitudes of way too many office workers. Guys who love it fantasize about tying their boss to a chair and forcing him to watch it.
Key Scene: Making copies.
Best Line: “It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.”
46. EASY RIDER 1969
With this low-budget road movie Peter Fonda and first-time director and costar Dennis Hopper shrewdly smuggled their brand of hippie hedonism into the pop mainstream. Hollywood was never the same. The film pioneered the use of wall-to-wall rock hits on its soundtrack and features a breakout performance by a B-movie veteran named Jack Nicholson, who took a small role as a boozy Southern lawyer and ran with it.
Key Scene: Nicholson’s first joint, around the campfire.
Best Line: “We blew it.”
47. DAZED AND CONFUSED 1993
For a generation of guys who graduated from suburban high schools in the late eighties and nineties, Richard Linklater’s pot-smoking, muscle car-driving teen saga is a cultural touchstone. Matthew McConaughey, as an aging loser who can’t let go of his glory days, steals the show.
Key Scene: Ben Affleck’s bully gets his comeuppance.
Best Line: “That’s what I like about these high school girls. I keep getting older; they stay the same age.”
48. THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI 1957
Who can forget the column of whistling British POWs marching off to build that bridge? Or Alec Guinness’s startled expression when he realizes that the Allied commandos, led by William Holden, want to blow it up? Director David Lean structured this war epic like a suspense picture: The stiff-upper-lipped POWs help the Japanese construct a strategically crucial bridge, while the commando team creeps through the jungle on a mission to destroy it.
Key Scene: Holden blows the bridge.
Best Line: “The fact is, what we’re doing could be construed as — forgive me, sir — collaboration with the enemy.”
49. COOL HAND LUKE 1967
A raunchy, violent, crudely humorous melodrama in which a colorful assortment of grinning redneck thugs are brutalized in a Southern prison camp. Paul Newman heads a memorable cast of sweat-stained freakazoids: George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Joe Don Baker. In the sixties some viewers saw the camp as a savage metaphor for a corrupt, repressive society. What were they smoking?
Key Scene: Eating those eggs.
Best Line: “What we got here is a failure to communicate.”
50. FLETCH 1985
Chevy Chase’s smirky contempt for everything decent is a welcome tonic here. While investigating a murder he makes fools of an endless series of unsuspecting jerks. He also bags the foxy Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, whose hyphenated name is still mentioned in hushed and reverent tones wherever video geeks congregate.
Key Scene: Mattress police.
Best Line: “If you shoot me you’re liable to lose a lot of those humanitarian awards.”